New Tesla for the Masses: Orders off the Hook

April 2, 2016

Less than a day after Elon Musk officially unveiled the jaw-dropping Model 3 at the Tesla Design Center, he took to Twitter to announce that 232,000 reservations have been placed. The figure isn’t surprising considering earlier in the day Musk tweeted that 180,000 Model 3 deposits were accepted in just 24 hours since the reservation window opened. This crushes our earlier predictions that Tesla would sell 100,000 units within the first day.

And that’s really the important piece. It’s getting hotter faster than it has in a dozen millennia at least. There’s been more CO2 in the air in the past, temperatures have been hotter in the past; but those changes happened slowly, over tens or hundreds of thousands of years. We’re seeing those same changes now happening in centuries. Less.

“The car is expected to have a range of 215 miles at a base price of $35,000.”

Actually, the car will have a minimum range of 215 miles, and likely will have more. Because it will need to have more by the time they really start coming off the assembly line in significant numbers, which is Q1 2018.

Yeah,…. 2018!

By that, time, Chevy may well have the Bolt V. 2 out there. We may see a 300 mile Leaf by that time. That’s enough time to have a new player on the scene, changing all the rules.

There is far more truth and honest reporting in the 2 minutes of the opening BBC clip than in the whole 23 minutes of marketing BS from Musk. If I have to sit through that much of his marketing “yodeling” again, my head may explode a la “Mars Attacks”—-that would be a shame, because I WAS looking forward to moving to Mars and living in one of Musk’s Mars colonies (where my head would likely explode anyway one day (like Arnie’s) because of a pressure containment failure).

GB hints at the fallacies in Musk’s big plans. There are now ~25 electric and plug-in/hybrid cars available in the U.S., most of them not pure EV’s and all working to improve and gain market share. The “affordable” Volt and Leaf are now on sale and the Bolt is likely to be on the streets in significant numbers WAY ahead of the Model 3.

Musk’s “Master Plan”—progressing through Roadster-Model S-Model X to Model 3 and “high volume production”—has not really worked all that well so far in terms of sales and profits, and anyone who bets on the Model 3 being on the streets in any numbers before the END of 2018 is ignoring history. I wonder how many of those “early adopters” will wait around for Tesla? I suspect that many of them are like the 16-year-old in the BBC clip who ordered one “because his Daddy has a Tesla and it’s cool”—-mindless consumers, fad-followers, and spoiled rich kids—-the same ones who camp out on the street overnight for the opening of new movies.

“We don’t make slow cars”, says Musk. Someone needs to remind him that they don’t make pickup trucks or SUV’s either, and those segments of the vehicle market rose considerably in market share in 2015 while sales of EV’s went down from 2014. 250+K pre-orders? That’s about 1/10 the number of pickups sold during 2015 (~2,540,000), and not much below the total number of EV’s ever sold in this country. Long live bright-sidedness!

Good luck, Elon. I don’t really wish Tesla ill, because EV’s need to succeed to help reduce CO2 emissions, but I’m not going to sell my Solar Roadway stock just yet and rush to buy Tesla’s. One piece of pie-in-the-sky at a time is all an old guy can handle.

Fleet electric vehicles are the next big market. My local water district has V-8 Ford F-150s idling down the bike paths when they could be using a fraction of the energy with an electric drivetrain. The parasitic losses dwarf the propulsive energy even if you don’t count the heat lost out of the tailpipe and radiator. My local police department has been using hybrid SUVs exclusively for their community service officers for the past few years. It saves them a lot of money in fuel and maintenance costs versus the old white vans they used to drive. And they are silent when trolling through neighborhoods.

There is also good news from India (Population 1.252 billion+) they are joining Norway and the Netherlands (Population approx 22 millions) in looking to the near term future to make the transition to 100 %electric vehicles. To succeed this must be encouraged by governments (both local and national) with financial incentives to tempt people to change.

Tesla have gained a great start in the resurrection of an old (and nearly forgotten) technology, and it is good to see them release a more affordable model. Might trade in my old Volvo yet.